Saturday, February 04, 2012

Age of Obama Reminiscent of Carter's Age of Malaise

In the US of the late 1970s, Americans experienced an economic and emotional malaise which has since been associated with the Jimmy Carter presidency. Survivalism and prepperism were in full boom time, in the late days of the Carter Presidency.

After Carter left office, Americans seemed to recover their typical sense of optimism and opportunity. Survivalism and doomerism settled down to much lower levels of activity. But for those who had experienced the Carter malaise, the taste of uneasiness and foreboding remained deep, undercover.

In the age of US President Obama, that strange sense of imminent disaster has returned, and is felt even by supporters of the "hope and change" president. If Mr. Obama succeeds at being re-elected -- something President Carter was unable to do in his own age of malaise -- the sense of impending Obama-doom is likely to grow to suffocating levels.

"We could see a cascade of higher interest rates, margin calls, stock market collapses, bank runs, currency revaluations, mass street protests, and riots," [Rawles] told Reuters. "The worst-case end result would be a Third World War, mass inflation, currency collapses, and long term power grid failures."

..."Modern preppers are much different from the survivalists of the old days," he said. "You could be living next door to a prepper and never even know it. Many suburbanites are turning spare rooms into food pantries and are going for survival training on the weekends."

Like other preppers, Snider is worried about the end of a functioning U.S. economy. He points out that tens of millions of Americans are on food stamps and that many U.S. children are living in poverty.

"Most people have a gut feeling that something has gone terribly wrong, but that doesn't mean that they understand what is happening," he said. "A lot of Americans sense that a massive economic storm is coming and they want to be prepared for it." _Reuters

Of course the skankstream media pretends that this deep uneasiness has nothing to do with President Obama, or with the millions of Americans who lost hope and have been driven out of the job market since Obama took office. It fails to associate the ongoing housing and banking crisis, the high level deflation combined with low level inflation, with the Obama war against the US private sector and the Obama energy starvation agenda. The Obama-friendly media has not sounded any warning calls regarding the great shift in power from the private sector to government under Obama which threatens to destroy the fiscal foundations of government at all levels . . . Mr. Obama's all out spending spree has led to a sky-rocketing of US federal debt to unprecedented levels at an unprecedented rate, in what might be perceived by some cynical souls (at least those who had read Mr. Obama's autobiographies) as a conscious effort to weaken the world's only superpower, down to its very roots.

If Mr. Obama is re-elected, there will be no long term return of optimism, as there had been after the defeat of the malaise-laden President Carter. Most Americans sense this, and yet, an observation of the early primary and debate results of the opposition US Republican Party points to a high likelihood of re-election for the current incumbent president. Mr. Obama's opposition candidates appear to be engaged in a dysfunctional barroom brawl of dirty infighting, which to most of the voting public appears even more distasteful than the picture of the current administration being presented to them on the nightly news.

It is beginning to seem to a large cross-section of Americans that any common ground they may have once had, is now either slipping away, or being consciously destroyed by those currently in power. This growing loss of cohesiveness among those who would otherwise have united against the emotional and economic darkness descending over America, can only help one group -- the Washington DC based vultures currently picking over the scattered bones of the republic and the populace.

All of this could have happened 32 years ago, had Jimmy Carter been re-elected as US President. But 32 years ago, the majority of Americans united behind a former film star and California governor, Ronald Reagan. In 2012, it is not clear that there is anyone of sufficient grit and substance who is capable of uniting most of the people behind him ( or her).

If things continue to play out in this way, the survivalists and preppers may very well have their day after all.